Frontken Berhad Annual Report 2018

11 Frontken Corporation Berhad (651020-T) ANNUAL REPORT 2018 Chairman’s Message (cont’d) sustaining the provision of these services through continued training and development plans to accommodate and prepare for the current and future needs of our customers and their requirements. The emphasis will be on training and developing manpower with multi-skilled competencies, continued focus on cost- saving measures ensuring optimum consumption and allocation of resources and implementing performance matrix objectives and tools to monitor and manage overall performance and effectiveness. Banking on our well-trained and experienced personnel coupled with excellent HSE record with goal zero Incident mantra, amongst our other offerings, the creation of our local Power Team dedicated to cater to the power generation industry requirements will pave way for the realisation of our projected 2019 revenue. Frontken Singapore Frontken Singapore Pte Ltd (“FSPL”) came out of its shell in FYE2018 with a stellar performance; recording an operating profit of RM18.4 million on the back of a revenue of RM66.1 million, an increase of 318.2% and 15.0% respectively compared to the preceding year. I believe FSPL was our best performing unit in terms of profit growth. As mentioned in my statement last year, we secured a new customer that will contribute positively to our performance. Although the contribution was not as much as we had anticipated it nonetheless played a part in our improved performance. The main contributor was from our existing customers that saw increased demand for their products. That coupled with some excellent cost savings from process optimisation as a result of our R&D efforts saw our margins improved tremendously. The better performance from our oil and gas division also helped. However, more hard work needs to be done to ensure that we stay ahead of the pack. At the outset of 2018, we implemented a series of action in our engineering/oil and gas division which included optimising both manpower and resources and sharpening our focus. Those initiatives bore fruits as costs reduced significantly and with it the losses as well, leading to it achieving EBITDA breakeven. Increased activities and steady work orders from new and existing customers further helped our cause in trying to turn around this business unit. Moving forward It had been a busy year but we hope we will be even busier in the new year. As we leave behind another good year and turn to a new page, we remain cautiously optimistic of the outlook for 2019. We are constantly open and ready for new challenges as we work in an increasingly competitive environment coupled with uncertainties. To that end, we will continue to embrace the same purpose and stand guided by the same values that define who we are and how we will move forward as a Group by focusing on our strategic priorities. The Group’s performance this year had definitely raised the bar for us for the coming years. Having said that, we will continue to explore ways to add new sources of value to our customers through our initiatives such as reducing costs, improving productivity and efficiency in all areas of our operations. We will also continue to look for new opportunities for growth or partnership and collaborations in taking our business to greater heights including undertaking merger and acquisition to further boost our bottom line.